The bell tolls for commercial software

This morning I was reading a thread here about WP vs MT, and surfed over to a blog where the debate is raging in earnest. I find the very question fascinating for the simple reason that MT is commercial and WP is free free free. I have to wonder how the MT model will work as two things happen:

More and more potential users acquire the rudimentary PHP skillz necessary to whip WP into shape; and

Third-party templates like Gemeni and Kubrick continue to appear to make setting up WP completely brainless and easy.

I reckon that’s gotta knock the stuffing out of the MT model. The best they can do is use their revenues to market their product more widely and effectively, but it’s like treading water, and there’s almost no question of their maintaining much of a technical edge. The only way out I see for them is to partner with big guys like Dell or AOL or whatever makes sense. As a commecial entity, they can do that in ways that would never make sense for WP. On the other hand, Dell and IBM and others are doing fine with GNU software such as Linux, so maybe you don’t need a commercial model to work with such folks.
My last real job was with a company trying to produce a commercial CMS. We had Vignette in our sights, and eventually went bankrupt. Today I can get most of what we were trying to do out of Textpattern, at no licensing cost and a much reduced integration cost. Only question might be scalability of some of these PHP GNU apps, but I am sure there are ways to tackle that. I’m pretty glad I got out of my last company when I did.